Announcing OpenOrchard & koinos

Hello Hivers, we are OpenOrchard™, a new company made up of the OpenSeed™ Team and four former members of the Steem Team. Listed in alphabetical order they are: Michael Vandeberg (@vandeberg), Nathaniel Caldwell, Steve Gerbino (@gerbino) and @theoretical.

About the Team

Michael and Theoretical were founding members of the team that launched the Steem blockchain. As one of the co-inventors of Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (along with Dan Larimer), Theoretical helped train Michael in blockchain development. During their tenures at Steemit they worked on many projects together including the Resource Credit system which makes Hive (formerly Steem) the most advanced blockchain for delivering a consistent user experience.

Steve joined the team in 2018 to assist in the completion of the Smart Media Tokens protocol which went live on testnet in October of 2019, while Nathan helped the whole team execute by serving as product manager.

OpenOrchard™

These are incredibly talented engineers with decades of combined experience building enterprise grade software, distributed systems, and of course, blockchains. With these additions to the team we have expanded the ambitions of this project in ways that are outlined below. In order to help accomplish our now even loftier ambitions we have created a new company named OpenOrchard™.

We Support Hive

Before going into our plans for this company, we want to reiterate our support for Hive and the Hive community. Our mission is still to make open source software development economically competitive with private solutions by providing app developers with turnkey backend solutions that make it easier than ever to bootstrap games and applications that utilize digital assets to engage users and generate revenue. We believe that Hive will play a critical role in progressing this mission.

Solving Different Problems

In order to add the most value to the Hive ecosystem, and the blockchain ecosystem more generally, we have to build solutions that Hive does not itself offer. No blockchain is capable of supporting media storage, real-time operations or ephemeral communications at scale. This has left many blockchain-powered applications lacking in basic functionalities like fast, easy, and free account creation, easy login, and encrypted messaging. All of these features will be on display in our social networking and encrypted messaging application, OpenLink, which will be launching with Hive integration to Beta testers soon.

That's why OpenSeed is being developed as a distributed network of servers which are optimized for providing features to blockchain-powered apps like those found on the Hive network. These are only the initial feature sets that we are developing in OpenSeed with the specific goal of delivering value to Hive developers and users.

Gaming Focus

OpenSeed is still going to deliver on promises made to the Steem, now Hive, community and with the addition of blockchain engineers, we plan to build a next-generation base layer named Koinos™ that we believe will be especially useful to game developers looking to integrate digital tokens and assets into their platforms.

Steem demonstrated that many powerful features can remain stranded in the base layer without tooling that makes it easy for developers to integrate these features into their apps. Well designed second layer tools like Hivemind (the software powering Communities on both Hive and Steem) prove that nearly unlimited features can be unlocked from extremely simple base layer operations like custom JSON.

First Class Second Layer

With OpenSeed, we are treating the second layer as an integral part of our ecosystem. Our priority is ensuring that developers and users have access to as many powerful features as possible while maximizing independence and choice when it comes to where they store their data.

We are leveraging our experience and expertise in the blockchain space to create a blockchain and second layer that are designed to work together. This approach will allow us to provide developers with far more, and far better, tools and features than they would otherwise have access to. By integrating OpenSeed with other blockchains, beginning with Hive, we can provide those tools and features to existing devs and users within the applications they already know and love, while allowing them to take advantage of additional features as new blockchains like Koinos come online.

Developers, Developers, Developers

The most important thing to us is that we develop software that game and application developers, especially Hive app developers, actually need. We have already received some great feedback from developers and we hope to receive far more over the coming months. If you are interested in helping to guide the development of our software please stop by our discord server and join our community.

We have many more exciting announcements in store, so be sure to follow this account for important updates.

To learn more about OpenSeed and OpenLink, check out the following posts:

Does this mean you are still planning on building a separate blockchain than HIVE, which could end up being a competitor to HIVE? And if so, doesn't that mean this project could eventually take value from HIVE?

If its superior to Hive i hope it takes 100% of the value and HIVE dies. Thats how crypto should work.
That will not happen, ofc, so i see no problem (even if that was the case) with them wanting to develop different solutions to problems.We should praise those kinds of things, not fear them... or am i just being naive in actually believing in what crypto should be about?

How many different projects came from Ethereum? Did they take value away from Eth or did that establish Ethereum as a industry leader?
Let new projects compete so we can showcase the strength of HIVE.

I mean they are openly saying here that they will develop for Hive so i dont get what the problem is

No, his cardinal sin was that hes a nutjob that threatens to physically hurt people and that hes an overall unpleasant person.
Avalon (or whatever its called) would have actually hit the funding goal had he not been such a jackass.

Yes exactly, except unlike Facebook messenger, it's open source so any developer can integrate the chat into their application. Practically speaking what that means is that you could begin a conversation with someone (like me) in peakd.com, and then we can move over to 3speak.online and continue the conversation!

Indeed my friend. Andrarchy has been managing the communication for Stinc for years. He is an expert at using technical mumbo-jumbo and giving fake promises.

They have 6 engineers and nothing to show, and they are raising funds aggressively. I wouldn't go as far as calling it a scam because there are a few people I respect in their group, but it surely looks like one.

I'm extremely stoked for encrypted messaging. I know I've mentioned it multiple times before but I feel that is probably the single most important missing functionality of HIVE front-ends. Communication is so important; we are social creatures. The other pieces will fall into place when tribes can congregate to brainstorm and mobilize towards their divergent goals.

We also tend to be pretty lazy creatures, haha! Everyone is used to speed and convenience in the modern lifestyle, and social media is no different. Continuing to follow this project with interest, and willing to be involved in beta testing. Cheers!

that we believe will be especially useful to game developers looking to integrate digital tokens and assets into their platforms.

Will you be working on this with SMTs in mind? Will you be also working to provide a basic template on how to create an efficient economy for games? Most games in their respective genres have universal rules so i dont think it would be hard create templates. Many developers in crypto do a horrible job when it comes to setting up a self sufficient economy.
Not having to think too much about how to set up the economy and monetize the game would make it much more appealing to try out HIVE

There is so much here that is really exciting! Working on the infrastructure and development tools to allow individual and enterprise solutions is going to add so much value to the entire industry as a whole.

May I ask how OpenOrchard will make money? Will it mainly consulting enterprises on the implementation of the open-source tools it develops? Or have I misunderstood something?

Im an end user that doesnt understand a word you just wrote there but! Yay so exited to hear there are so many new things to come from such amazing devs!!🧡🧡🧡🧡 Thank you for all that you guys did and do!!!

This is really exciting stuff. You're right, level 2 solutions on Hive are amazing thanks to custom JSON operations. Steem Engine is a level 2 solution that uses them to great effect as well. One feature which I build into my own library Hive Stream is the ability to do time-based actions (call code at a specific point in time in the future). To my knowledge, no blockchain (definitely not Ethereum) supports such a thing. If this was a proper level 2 solution offered by a team such as yourself, it would be amazing.